Factual, the open database company, closed a $25 million series A financing, led by Andreessen Horowitz and Index Ventures. VCs Ben Horowitz of AH and Danny Rimer of Index will be joining Factual’s board. Ron Conway’s SV Angel and former Hollywood agent Michael Ovitz also invested, as did some of the previous angels who put in about $2 million earlier this year (only half of which was previously disclosed). “The company has very significant aspirations,” says Rimer,” what they are seeking to do is extremely ambitious. We believe they will need a lot of funding.”

Factual started out as sort of a wiki for databases. Anyone can create or add data to Factual, and it has all sorts of APIs to make it easy for Websites and developers to build apps on top of the data. It also lets developers and consumers visualize this big data in all sorts of ways. But over the past few months, the company started to focus on a few key areas, especially local. It is also building datasets around healthcare, education, entertainment, and government.

But its big push right now is in local. It has a places database filled with the names, locations, addresses, phone numbers, and other info on 14 million businesses in the U.S. Geo apps like Booyah rely on this places database for their services. Factual’s biggest potential customer, however, is Facebook. Right now, Facebook Places in Japan and the UK is based at least partially on Factual data. If Factual can grow with Facebook Places, it has a chance to win the bigger business in the U.S. and elsewhere. It probably doesn’t hurt that Marc Andreesen sits on Facebook’s board.

Factual was founded by Gil Elbaz, who earlier co-founded Applied Semantics (that company was bought by Google for $100 million and became AdSense). He wants to build a big data company that creates and maintains valuable datasets that other Websites and developers can then build their apps on top of. Access to the data is very cheap or free at low volumes, but once an app starts to take off, Factual starts to charge data licensing fees based on how much data is used.

Andreesen Horowitz And Index Lead $25 Million Round For Big Data Startup Factual

MSKYNET, a company that allows businesses to create and analyze the usage of 2D barcodes called SPARQCodes, launched a service today helps local businesses connect their customers with their online presences, such as Facebook, Twitter, Gowalla, and Foursquare. MSKYNET raised $550K in seed funding back in August.

SPARQCodes are very similar to normal QR codes, but differ slightly because they link to a URL instead of embedding their payload data in the QR code itself. The new feature, which is called ‘Connect N Share’, is very straightforward — it makes it easy for businesses to generate QR codes that link to the business’s presence on Twitter and/or Facebook. The idea is to direct customers who are waiting in line or for their food to scan a code that they see on the wall, which leads them directly to the business’s Facebook page.

Setting up your QR code printout using the new feature is actually pretty slick. First, you type in the name of your business — the web app will try to automatically find the matching Facebook and Twitter accounts (you can tweak this if it guesses wrong). Enter your address, and it will try to pair it up with your Foursquare, Gowalla, and UrbanSpoon accounts. Add a logo, hit ‘Build it!’, and you’re done. The site will spit out a printout with your QR codes, directing visitors to your business to scan them.

Businesses with more substantial social media presences can direct users to a list of sites that are relevant — a restaurant might also include Yelp in their mini-portal, for example. Founder Jesse Chor says that the company is mainly targeting small businesses and franchises, which tend to value a social media presence, but do not usually have the technical expertise to make their own QR codes.

There is one caveat to this: customers will have to log into your Facebook or Twitter account to like or ‘follow’ the business if they are not logged in already, so the experience may not be as seamless as ‘checking in’ via a smartphone’s native Facebook application for example.

The codes and the analytics that come with them will be provided free of charge, but businesses will have to pay to include additional social media services that may crop up over time. Chor also stated that MSKYNET will charge for “customer retention programs,” in the future, but did not elaborate on what they might be.

MSKYNET is far from the first company to offer QR code analytics (see here for a good list of other services), and it isn’t the first to target local businesses either — Google has its own business-facing QR code features, too, as do some other QR code companies.

SPARQCode Makes It A Snap For Local Businesses To Use QR Codes